For visuals on this topic please visit WITHOUT
SANCTUARY.
Be warned that these photographs are very disturbing.

LYNCHING AS SOCIAL CONTROL
The social hierarchy created by Jim Crow Laws, with people of European
descent at the top, could not work without violence being used against
those being forcibly kept on the bottom rung. Lynching was terrorism (72 percent of recorded lynching incidences were directed towards African
Americans) to maintain the 'caste' system and to
enforce an unnatural state of economic and social segregation between
human beings. To survive under the legal
and social system in place in the
South between 1880 and 1954, a person of African descent had to carefully
limit his contact with whites to such socially and legally sanctioned
careers such as laborer, barbering and domestic - and beyond this
keep totally apart and maintain a subservient attitude.

George Fredrickson, a historian, stated it this way:
"Lynching represented...a way of using fear and terror to check
'dangerous' tendencies in a Black community considered to be ineffectively
regimented or supervised. As such it constituted a confession that
the regular institutions of a segregated society provided an inadequate
measure of day-to-day control."

The U.S. Congress attempted to pass anti-lynching
legislation with the NAACP
sponsored Dyer bill of 1922, the Wagner-Costigan bill of 1931, and
the Wagner-Gavagan bill of 1940. On each occasion, the U.S. House of Representatives successfully
passed the legislation. However, they failed to muster enough votes
in the U.S. Senate for closure. Sixty votes were needed to break the filibusters
and bring the bills to a vote. Southern senators successfully filibustered
all three bills and the legislation died. Their primary complaint
was that murder is a crime against the state and not the federal government.
That may have been true, however, officials from these states were
doing little to stop the lynching and murder of Blacks. Few were prosecuted
for these crimes, and even fewer were convicted. 1

For two decades, following these initial attempts to
enact legislation, the NAACP
was the primary organization fighting for the Civil Rights of Blacks.
After WW II they waged a successful campaign against lynching throughout the
South. By the mid 1950s, they had enough public awareness to successfully turn public
opinion against the practice and lynching became extremely rare. White
supremacist organizations stopped using the threat and action of lynching.

In the pre-Civil Rights South, if an
African American man was thought to be involved in a murder or rape,
or even expressed interest in a white woman, chances were very high
he could be lynched without a trial. This occurred as recently as
1955 when 14 year old Emmett Till of Chicago was visiting relatives
in Mississippi, whistled at a white woman on a bet, and was brutally
murdered a few days later. The widespread national media publicity of this violent murder caused outrage in a more and more connected, sophisticated and educated American population and the tide began to turn against lynching.

The common European American 'rational' for lynching
was based (1) on the Southern sentiment/emotion of "honor" and (2) behavior patterns common
to mobs. Especially in crimes of rape, it was widely thought that
a lynching spared the woman involved the humiliation and distress
of having to answer questions in open court but also redeemed male
relatives, whose "honor" had also been affected.

Mob behavior patterns also
made lynching a reality. Through the ages people have gone along with
mobs, succumbing to peer pressure and mob mentality even if they objected to what was taking place--- they feared for their
lives, families and property ,
and contributed bodily to events that would never happen if they were
acting on their own accord. In an uneducated, mostly rural, early
to mid 20th century culture, mob mentality was a true danger to anyone
socially disenfranchised , and especially to those with dark skin.

Lynching took place in the City of Atlanta during
the race riot of 1906, but most frequently occurred in the countryside
where ignorance and mob mentality easily sided with negrophobia, an
ever present mental quality in a state sanctioned segregated society.
The mob vigilante mentality and the KKK
became the unofficial enforcers of Jim
Crow; between 1882 and 1918 approximately 2,522 black men were
lynched.

A lynching many times took on a medieval carnival
atmosphere with victims being dismembered and burned live at the stake
or hung. Parts of the victim were sometimes sold as souvenirs to spectators.
It was socially acceptable for whole families to travel from miles
away to witness the event. Sometimes special trains for attendees
were run by the local railroad company if an especially big turnout
was expected.

The inchoate main stream news media then, as in the seedier publications of the present day, was geared towards sensationalist entertainment and the
newspapers would publish blow-by-blow accounts of lynching
activities. Lynching was the socially condoned pornography from the late 1800's until after WWII when Americans with all skin colors came back from fighting with a different world view. 1964 saw the last lynching of three young men working for the Civil Rights Movement in Missippissi.

There are several recently published books on lynching
including At the Hands of Persons Unknown by Phillip Dray (Random
House NY, 2002) and Without Sanctuary (Twin Palms Press, 2000).
Without Sanctuary is a very disturbing collection of
photographs and postcards put together by James Allen and John Littlefield
of Atlanta. There is also a website
and a traveling exhibit scheduled to open in Atlanta on May1, 2002,
at the Martin
Luther King National Historic Site on Auburn Ave, where it will
remain until December 1.

The following are statistics provided by the Archives
at Tuskegee Institute.

Lynchings: By Year and Race

Year

Whites

Blacks

Total

1882

64

49

113

1883

77

53

130

1884

160

51

211

1885

110

74

184

1886

64

74

138

1887

50

70

120

1888

68

69

137

1889

76

94

170

1890

11

85

96

1891

71

113

184

1892

69

161

230

1893

34

118

152

1894

58

134

192

1895

66

113

179

1896

45

78

123

1897

35

123

158

1898

19

101

120

1899

21

85

106

1900

9

106

115

1901

25

105

130

1902

7

85

92

1903

15

84

99

1904

7

76

83

1905

5

57

62

1906

3

62

65

1907

3

58

61

1908

8

89

97

1909

13

69

82

1910

9

67

76

1911

7

60

67

1912

2

62

64

1913

1

51

52

1914

4

51

55

1915

13

56

69

1916

4

50

54

1917

2

36

38

1918

4

60

64

1919

7

76

83

1920

8

53

61

1921

5

59

64

1922

6

51

57

1923

4

29

33

1924

0

16

16

1925

0

17

17

1926

7

23

30

1927

0

16

16

1928

1

10

11

1929

3

7

10

1930

1

20

21

1931

1

12

13

1932

2

6

8

1933

2

24

28

1934

0

15

15

1935

2

18

20

1936

0

8

8

1937

0

8

8

1938

0

6

6

1939

1

2

3

1940

1

4

5

1941

0

4

4

1942

0

6

6

1943

0

3

3

1944

0

2

2

1945

0

1

1

1946

0

6

6

1947

0

1

1

1948

1

1

2

1949

0

3

3

1950

1

1

2

1951

0

1

1

1952

0

0

0

1953

0

0

0

1954

0

0

0

1955

0

3

3

1956

0

0

0

1957

1

0

1

1958

0

0

0

1959

0

1

1

1960

0

0

0

1961

0

1

1

1962

0

0

0

1963

0

1

1

1964

2

1

3

1965

0

0

0

1966

0

0

0

1967

0

0

0

1968

0

0

0

Total

1,297

3,445

4,742

From Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch, pg 103:

In 1954 the Institute announced it was going
to cease publication of its annual lynch letter, which the college
had published every year since 1912. There had been no reported
lynchings for the past 2 years and only 6 since 1949. Henceforth,
Tuskegee would report each year on Negro jobs and income figures
instead of lynchings.

Credit for the above statistic chart and more Tuskegee
statistics are here.